Update
             205 reported killed in Taiwanese jet crash
     TAIPEI, Taiwan - February 16, 1998 2:54 p.m. EST - A China Air-
 lines jet trying to land in fog crashed into a country neighborhood
 Monday, ripping the roofs off houses before skidding into a rice
 paddy and erupting in flames. Authorities said all 196 aboard and
 nine people on the ground were killed.
     Firefighters went house to house in the blackened neighborhood,
 putting out the flames licking doors and windows and searching for
 survivors. Searchlights illuminated a life raft from the Airbus
 A-300, wrapped around a broken tree stump. Seats from the plane were
 scattered in the dirt, one with a body trapped beneath it.
     China Airlines said the dead included the governor of Taiwan's
 Central Bank and other key financial officials; four Americans; and
 many Taiwanese families returning from vacations in Bali. Victims
 on the ground included a 2-month-old baby.
     Witnesses said the plane hit several hundreds yards short of
 the runway at Chiang Kai-shek airport, 25 miles west of Taipei. It
 tore through homes along a highway before coming to rest in flames
 in the rice paddy.
     "It came down -- I heard a loud explosion and a fireball. And
 then I thought the chances for any survivors were slim," said a
 vendor in the area, who identified himself only as Mr. Yang.
     The impact scattered charred bodies and body parts throughout
 the area. Authorities sealed off the neighborhood, leaving families
 of passengers to congregate at hospitals and the airport.
     "They all went to Bali on a trip -- and they are all dead," said
 one woman, whose four children were on the flight.
     Rescue workers on the scene said they had given up looking for
 survivors, but the deputy director-general of Taiwan's Civil Aero-
 nautics Administration, Chang Kuo-cheng, said he still hoped to find
 survivors among the 182 passengers and 14 crew members.
     Airport officials said two flight data recorders were recovered
 and were being analyzed to help determine the cause of the crash.
     The twin-engine Airbus went down while attempting to land on a
 second approach at 8:09 p.m. local time at the airport's northern
 runway, the Taipei-based China Airlines reported.
     Heavy fog was reported around the airport throughout the after-
 noon and evening, and a light rain was falling at the time of the
 crash.
     The plane had been asked to make the second approach due to poor
 visibility, said Hamilton Liu, a China Airlines spokesman. Earlier,
 the Civil Aeronautics Administration had said the visibility was
 reported to be adequate.
     Tsai Tuei, director of the Civil Aeronautics Administration,
 resigned to take moral responsibility for the crash, which was the
 worst in the airport's history. It came after Taiwan's flagship
 carrier embarked on an extensive safety campaign that followed a
 crash in Japan in 1994 that claimed 264 lives.
     Among the passengers on flight CI-676 were Sheu Yuan-dong,
 governor of Taiwan's Central Bank, his wife, and four other finance
 officials returning from a conference in Bali. They included Chen
 Huang, head of the bank's Department of Foreign Exchange, and Chien
 Chi-min, head of the Department of Economic Research.
     China Airlines released the names but not the hometowns of the
 four Americans aboard. The names appeared to be those of three men
 and a woman.
     In a statement, Airbus Industrie -- based in Toulouse, France -
 - said the plane that crashed was delivered to China Airlines from
 the production line in December 1990. By the end of January, the
 aircraft had accumulated approximately 20,070 flight hours in some
 8,800 flights, Airbus said.
     In 1994, a China Airlines A300-600R exploded and burned during
 an aborted landing in Nagoya, Japan, killing 264 people.
     The airline has had four other crashes since 1986. After the
 1994 Nagoya crash, it embarked on an extensive safety program that
 included pilot retraining.
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